Colonist or Royalist?

It’s what every American should be asking themselves this week. The Tea Party too.

Do you stand with the modern-day British East India Corporations and their masters (the Kochs, the Olins, the Bradleys and other royals that want to unmake the American Century and rig American democracy like they rigged the financial markets)? Or do you stand with the people in your community? Who do you serve?

After you quit foaming at the mouth, you will hopefully realize most of the US billionaires on the Forbes 400 list including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffet as well as Mr. Goodnight here in NC are far more alinged with the dems than the reps.

Corporate money flows just as freely to one side as the other. Look at Goldman Sachs political donations or Jamie Dimon or Mayor Bloomberg et al. Many of them espouse “progressive” aka liberal policies, both on the cultural and economic side.

Both major parties have been captured by rich contributors to the detriment of the poor, in collusion with the corporate media cartel. I believe the best strategy against the rich must include a broad popular movement to punish big-spending campaigns and deliberately vote for less well-funded candidates. This has the advantage of undercutting the effectiveness of advertising as a revenue stream for the media cartel and there is no way for the corporate paymasters to fight it with more money. This applies especially in primaries, where there will tend to be more than one acceptable choice. The voter may find two candidates equally appealing on the issues but chooses the one who has less money.

In the end, the candidate working for big money cannot be working for the people. We learned that with Obama, who said all the things we wanted to hear and then went to work for Wall Street. We must vote always against big money, while we are still allowed to vote at all.

As long as we stay divided in Us vs. Them, (republican or democrat vs the evil other) the plutocracy will laugh all the way to the bank. The power of the people is much greater than the people in power.

By now you’ve heard the cookie joke. You know: a CEO, a tea party member, and a union worker are all sitting at a table when a plate with a dozen cookies arrives. Before anyone else can make a move, the CEO reaches out to rake in eleven of the cookies. When the other two look at him in surprise, the CEO locks eyes with the tea party member. “You better watch him,” the executive says with a nod toward the union worker. “He wants a piece of your cookie.”

Can I just say that in North Carolina, particularly in the east, the elites were pretty much squarely on the side of the Continental Congress, and it was the poor unwashed scraping a living in the interior who were most likely to be Tories?

Cowan’s Bridge, the first battle of the Revolution in the state pitted the landed gentry of Wilmington – whose control over local government never weakened even as they began to rebel – against the loyalist former highlanders who had settled away from the coast. That dynamic changed as the war went on, but in the beginning a lot of ordinary white colonists had a hard time choosing sides.

The Michigan Senate has approved legislation that gives state-appointed emergency managers the power to take over financially troubled local governments and schools and break labor contracts.

The Wednesday afternoon vote was 26-12 with all Democrats voting against it.

[...]

Numerous Democratic amendments, including one to cap the salary for Emergency Managers at the level of compensation received by the governor, and another to require that Emergency Managers appointed for school districts have some background in education, were voted down by Republicans during debate.

“This legislation gives Emergency Financial Managers a vast and dangerous expansion of powers, undermining local authority and voters, while establishing little oversight to ensure that they actually help these financially strained communities,” said Sen. Glenn Anderson (D-Westland).